A Poor Cousin of the Middle Class

The moral issue is obvious–this isn’t the kind of poverty that can be hung on a failure to live by the right values. There’s no “undeserving poor” here to scapegoat. These are Bill Clinton’s “people who live by the rules”, and they’re still losing the game.

In some ways, what’s more pressing is the economic issue. This is a breakdown of Fordism, and it is accelerating. The consumer society only works in the long haul as long as what people put in, they have reasonable hope of getting back out, that if they work at Wal-Mart, they might hope to shop at Wal-Mart. Right now the consumer society is sputtering along on credit card debt; if it runs out of gas for good, it’s going to be because the low end of the service industry has totally broken the Fordist contract. Short-term profits over the long term stability of wealth creation–what a stupid, stupid way to run the railroad, and we’re probably all going to pay for that stupidity soon enough.

Angry and ashamed? And you haven’t even read the Independent Women’s Forum response yet.

bq. I must have a heart made of granite, but I just can’t feel sorry for Caroline Payne, the off-and-on welfare mother/credit-card binger who’s supposed to an example of our nation’s beleaguered working poor, the “millions at the bottom of the labor force who contribute to the country’s prosperity” but don’t get anything back, as writer David K. Shipler puts it in “A Poor Cousin of the Middle Class,” this week’s sob story in Sunday’s NYT magazine–in which Caroline whines about her $6.80-an-hour job at a convenience store.

bq. From the way I read Caroline’s saga, it’s prosperous America that’s been handing out tens of thousands of dollars worth of freebies to Caroline over the years (Shipley is coy about her age), and Caroline who’s given very little back. One big reason that Caroline hasn’t moved up the economic ladder looks pretty simple to me: She refuses to wear her (free, Medicaid-supplied) dentures (check the photo). Sorry, Caroline (and oh-so-politically correct Shipler, who remarks sarcastically that Caroline is “missing that radiant, tooth-filled smile that Americans have been taught to prize as highly as their right to vote”). This may sound harsh, but if you want a job that entails interacting with the public or supervising employees, you gotta have teeth. Ask George Washington…

First, let’s get something straight: the woman has an email address . She has an answering machine. She has food, and she has state provided dentures and welfare. She owned a house, a TV set, a washer, a dryer, and a VCR. So she’s not poor by any reasonable absolute standard. Materially speaking, she’s better off than most of the people on the planet.

Concerning her personal decisions – she decided to have three kids , but then left her husband (on the *suspicion* that he was unfaithful). That was the decision that plunged her into poverty. Evidently her kids didn’t care about her, because they could have helped her out.

Yes, she had some terrible breaks – the abusive rapist 2nd husband, the retarded 4th child – but she’s substantially responsible for her own situation, what with the refusal to wear (free) dentures and the abandonment of her first marriage.

In any case, if you want to give charity money to this woman, be my guest. What fiscal conservatives are opposed to is taking that money from other hard-working people by force.

See, the thing you guys don’t get is this: you attack fiscal conservatives as “selfish”, but you’re the selfish ones. You want to spend money on this woman, but you don’t want to pony up your own hard-earned paycheck. Instead, you want to rob someone else to pay for her, and to feel morally superior if they resist.

Arrgh, overlap.

The dentures don’t fit, capitalist.

Who’s talking about taking anything? Much of the point of that article was that the wages are too damn low. Are people who get decent wages all stealing them from their employers?

See, the thing you guys don’t get is this: you attack fiscal conservatives as “selfish”, but you’re the selfish ones. You want to spend money on this woman, but you don’t want to pony up your own hard-earned paycheck. Instead, you want to rob someone else to pay for her, and to feel morally superior if they resist.

I think you must have brought this baggage in with you sir; you certainly didn’t buy it here. I don’t see one single mention of taxation as a solution in that article, or in this thread.

What everyone appears to have said is that there is something the matter with an economic system that allows a case like this to exist. Nobody’s suggested a solution here, and maybe there isn’t one, but we’ve acknowledged that there is a problem. You’re stuck between denying that there is a problem (your first paragraph), blaming the victim (your second and third) and blwoing smoke up the ass of straw men (your fourth and fifth). In other words, you’re refusing to address someone else’s problem, because you suspect that the solution of it would leave you poorer. There’s a word for that and it rhymes with “elfish”.

I’m always wondering (well not every second, but it occurs to me often) why we so seldom hear about Ford’s obvious but clearly not obvious enough insight, these days. Why the joy of cheap labor always trumps the joy of a prosperous set of consumers.

Tragedy of the commons-type argument. Unless you’re like Ford motors and big enough to internalise a significant proportion of the benefit of a wealthy local working class, the marginal benefit to you of cheaper labour is better than your share of the general benefit.

Heck, I know of a homeless person with a LiveJournal. She must not be poor, either, right?

Godless (compassionless, pitiless, loveless, friendless, hopeless):

$6.80 an hour.

That’s the news, right there, and it isn’t pretty. It’s fucking obscene, in this country, at this time, and that’s why I’m angry and ashamed at how we got to this point, and that I share a country and a culture–and a species–with Charlotte Allen, who can so smugly write off Caroline Payne to score cheap, insulting points in favor of cutting her tax bill by another hundred bucks at the next available opportunity.

Force? *Force* you to give up your hard-earned money? Don’t talk to me about force until you own up to the vectors that force people to put in hard work to earn wages grossly below the grossly discounted poverty level.

$6.80 an hour. Jesus. If Walmart is too fucking enamored of its profit margin to do the right thing by the people whose hard work built that margin in the first place, hell. I’d like to think the rest of us are decent enough to pitch in. And trust me: the “force” required to fund that sort of program is unnoticeable compared to the force Caroline Payne lives with every day of her life.

Godless wimp, more like.

kip:

-Someone who’s “homeless” but takes the time to maintain a live journal is a retard. S/he should get a job and get off the streets.

-You want to pay for her, be my guest. Clearly her wage didn’t prevent her from buying a house, a TV, etcetera. Maybe you can buy her an HDTV.

-Alternatively, why not start a company where you make it your raison d’etre to pay unskilled workers above-market wages. Ben and Jerry’s does it by charging an arm and a leg for ice cream. But somehow I think that reality might smack you in the face when you actually try running a business. Overpaying for people without skills sounds like a great idea on paper, but it is nothing more than charity. Ben and Jerry’s can only survive so long as other sectors of the economy are efficient (and as long as ice cream is a luxury good). For the working poor, they’re going to buy the generic variety of ice cream – the Wal-Mart everyday-low-prices variety that you so disdain.

“Blaming the victim” is a copout […] The woman […] shacked up with abusive men”

I must remember this one for when the OED decides to update its definition of “blaming the victim”.

Jeez, godless, do you _really_ think that money is taken from American citizens by the American government in the form of taxes *by force*? This is the type of rhetoric that the right employs in order to try and divert attention from their selfishness – if someone is taking something from you by force, obviously you are a victim, so as a victim you couldn’t possibly be guilty of being a selfish, uncaring person, right?

Right.

Ahem: You going to start knocking my hobbies now?

“shacked up with abusive men”

Cause, God knows, abusive men come with warning labels, and there is absolutely nothing like battered women’s syndrome. Jackass.

Here is the simple truth, mate, from someone who has been there: you get unlucky once, you make one bad decision, and you are screwed. I went to high school and college with guys who were about a billion times smarter than you and me and everyone on this thread combined – but because they had to work two jobs to help their family get buy, or because their mom died at the wrong time, or because their work schedule kept changing, or because they got sick at the wrong time, or because they were in a car wreck, or because they got caught with a joint in the tenth grade were done. Once you start the slide, its next to impossible to get back out.

As for the wages, you dip, union organizing is extremely difficult in this country, and thats a result of government and business policy. And the idea that an increase in wages always leads to an increase in costs is something that simply isn’t true in reality. Competition, the increased value of good labor, etc all help make that equation less simple than you want it to be. I might point out that Costco is challenging Sam’s Club for discount warehouse supremacy – and it does it while providing living wages and benefits. Unlike WalMart – where they teach their employees how to apply for food stamps.

Here is the bottom line: we have a system whose prosperity depends in part on people working jobs that leave them in situations like the women’s – subject to catastrophic loss for one bit of bad luck or one bad decision.

Overpaying for people without skills sounds like a great idea on paper, but it is nothing more than charity.

Parsed properly, this reads as ‘Treat your workers like slaves, because you can, and you’ll get rich. Ain’t capitalism great?’

Both morally and intellectually vacuous. Quite an achievement.

I’d just like to recommend ignoring godlesscapitalist when he shows up. He has lots of time to respond to whatever you put up, and continuing to argue is just banging your head against the wall. I mean, you’re simply not going to convince a believer in the Bell Curve thesis that poverty results from anything other than bad choices by stupid people, to reuse Chris’s phrase from another thread that was hijacked by similar forces.

I realize that this post is a personal attack on another poster, which is the sort of thing that is bad for thread comity in general–but I’ve seen godlesscapitalist take over threads in the past, and I think it’s best to organize a coerced ignoring efforts rather than see CT discussions go to shit.

Godless, you pitiless, loveless, hopeless bastard: if you’d bothered to read a little more of being_homeless’s LJ, you’d see she had an accident that left her with some brain damage. The technical details escape me, but mostly involve attention and focus, which have made the few day jobs she’s had since then difficult to impossible for both her and her employers. She does do advocacy work; she is going to be attending college; she’s making the best she can of a really bad hand. She was left homeless thanks to a bureaucratic snafu in her section 8 paperwork–thankfully, that looks like it’s getting cleared up shortly. So cheers to her.

But: “Get a job?” You must want to watch me dissolve in a sputtering rage. –Get a fucking heart. Get a fucking *clue*: There’s one bad day between you and her: _one bad day._ That’s it. That’s all.

I won’t defend GC, who hasn’t been a model of open-mindedness or courtesy.

But Henry calls conservatives “vicious and depraved,” accuses them of selfishness, and claims that American conservatives are, almost exclusively, unprincipled. He does this without any argument: these people disagree with me and the conclusions I draw from the limited information in the article, and therefore deserve to be dismissed and insulted. If he had limited his comments to the IWF article, he would be on more solid ground. But no: “many” conservatives are selfish and depraved.

Not setting a sterling example, are we, Henry?

The NYT article was deliberately written to arouse sympathy for Ms. Payne. The IWF article is deliberately written for the opposite effect. The truth of this situation is largely unknown to all posters, so the certainty of their opinions is rather striking.

Also – Davies – spare me the sanctimonious outrage over using “retard” as a pejorative, seeing as far more calumny than that has been heaped upon me in this thread.

You haven’t seen the beginning of it, you asshole.

In general, your arguments range from “selfish and very bad” to “selfish and at least logically consistent”. Since all we ever wanted to establish was that “Modern conservatives are selfish”, perhaps we can declare this data point settled?

Ken: No, Ophelia remembered it right. Ford (in those occasional moments when he wasn’t talking about the Jewish conspiracy) regularly said that one of his aims was to ensure that Ford workers could afford Ford cars.

In any case, I think you have the efficiency wage argument wrong, too. It also makes no sense to talk about Henry Ford “attracting the best workers available”. The whole point of a Fordist production line is that the skill of an individual worker is irrelevant to the quality or level of output of product. What Ford’s high-wage policy was meant to do was to motivate the workers that happened to show up to perform better (through demonstrating reciprocal loyalty, and through making a Ford job something to fear losing). It wasn’t, couldn’t have been about hiring workers of an intrinsically better type.

recommend ignoring godlesscapitalist…[because he] respond[s] to whatever you put up

The “aiyiyiyiyi-I’m-covering-my-ears-and-can’t-hear-you” defense. Good idea :)

Since all we ever wanted to establish was that “Modern conservatives are selfish”

Ok, cool, as long as we can concede that leftists are either well-meaning dupes who don’t understand economics…or disturbing people who adore mass murderers like Trotsky. As long as you’re killing and robbing in the name of “equality”, it’s all good, n’est ce pas ?

prick…asshole

You’d think you were trying to hurt my fweelings or something :) But I get the message. Dissent from the party line is unwelcome. Good day then, comrades!

“Jeez, godless, do you really think that money is taken from American citizens by the American government in the form of taxes by force?”

Not to step into an already ugly thread, but what exactly do you call putting someone in jail for breaking the law if not force? If a hypothetical government threatened those who spoke out against it with years in jail, wouldn’t we all call that taking away free speech by force?

As for the substance of the article, I took away from it that this woman had made a large number of unfortunate choices. As a person who makes bad choices I can sympathize. But I don’t particularly think that particularly justifies revamping our whole system.

“Ken: No, Ophelia remembered it right. Ford (in those occasional moments when he wasn’t talking about the Jewish conspiracy) regularly said that one of his aims was to ensure that Ford workers could afford Ford cars.”

But that doesn’t mean that enabling his workers to buy his cars was the secret of his profitability. He may have thought that it was, but as described, it was a roundabout way to give cars away to his workers.

“In any case, I think you have the efficiency wage argument wrong, too. It also makes no sense to talk about Henry Ford “attracting the best workers available”. The whole point of a Fordist production line is that the skill of an individual worker is irrelevant to the quality or level of output of product. What Ford’s high-wage policy was meant to do was to motivate the workers that happened to show up to perform better (through demonstrating reciprocal loyalty, and through making a Ford job something to fear losing). It wasn’t, couldn’t have been about hiring workers of an intrinsically better type.”

But it was about hiring the workers that performed better. Higher wages allowed him to pick and choose the workers that performed best. Their “intrinsic type” was irrelevant, except insofar as it affected their demonstrated performance at his assemly lines.

I have to admit to feeling some of the force of godlesscapitalist’s concern with bad (or at least, potentially curious) life choices. But what troubles me (as I think it troubles kevin and dsquared at the very least, and no doubt others) is that some people seem to be fairly well-buffered from the undesirable consequences of their mistaken or rash choices in life, where as others get hammered mercilessly for the rest of their lives based on one error of judgement.

The problem? The buffered/hammered distinction doesn’t seem to track any plausible conception of moral desert or legitimate entitlement that I can think of.

Now I’m not suggesting that people shouldn’t bear considerable responsibility for their choices in life. But I do wonder if the godless capitalists of the world should think more carefully about why it is that some people suffer badly for their mistaken or expensive choices, whereas others do not. Or at least, they’ll have to do better than simply appealing to natural virtues (“prudence and good character, not luck”) or the sanctity of brute luck (“two wrongs don’t make a right, so don’t touch the status quo”).

And just what does one put on a job application for address when one is homeless? or the phone number? or wear to the job interview. Some homeless advocacy groups have started figuring this out and providing addresses and phone numbers for people to use, and there is even one that collects women’s business clothes for interviews and the first couple weeks on the job. That said, these groups are few and far between.

Minimum wage laws = higher unemployment and inflation.

Ah, yes, that must be why unemployment has fallen and inflation remained constant and low since Britain introduced the minimum wage law in 1999. Even though the conservative opposition said it would put a million people out of work.

I’d suggest that you get a better textbook. I’m sure the market will provide.

I hesitate to wade into the above mudpile, but: why are people assuming that bad choices and bad luck are mutually exclusive? “All her fault” and “screwed by the market” are not the only two options here, y’know. My reading of her story leads me to believe that Caroline Payne made lots of bad choices and got a lot of raw deals, and both have contributed significantly to her present state. So her situation is neither 100% her fault nor 0%, and nobody can really say with any certainty where it is in between.

Now, plenty of people get bad breaks, make better choices, and do okay. And the converse is true as well, as loren says in his thoughtful comment. Repeatedly getting into horrible relationships, running up lots of credit-card debt due to lack of spending discipline: these are things millions of people do, and for most of them the results are negative but not disastrously so. To answer loren’s question, I think a lot of the difference has to do with small-scale social support networks; how well-buffered you are from your choices depends largely on who you have close to you that you can call on in time of need.

This dependence may not appeal to egalitarian notions of desert, but it is the inevitable outcome of any free system. There is no way to ameliorate “brute luck” without also restricting genuine choice. The right moral justification for maintaining market freedoms is not that those who make out badly in the market deserve it. It’s that the rest of us don’t deserve to be restricted or stolen from in order to take care of them.

Oh, and: what dan simon said. I always take too long to finish posts and miss the good things that other people say while I dither. :-)

Jumping into the fray. Couple of points (erm, well – more than a couple, actually)

1.) Life choices are indeed the main reason the woman in the article ‘dropped out’. Of course, those choices were not independent of the world around her.

2.) However, discussing society, as well as the systems that control it is rarely best done on the basis of one single case.

3.) There are indeed lots of people out there who are bad at making choices – People who either face a difficult starting point in life, or just – to put it bluntly – aren’t very bright.

4.) Our current society provides a huge amount of choices, by any historical standard. This is great for those that are capable of making use of them. (I.e. – a sizable majority.) However, it also provides ample opportunity to go wrong in life. Those that are poorly equipped for choice-making often do. (Even though they do ok by historical standards, they luck out by contemporary ones…)

5.) This leaves the majority with the decision of what to do about the minority.

6.) Helping them out in various ways is the usual response. Either by charity, state support, or both.

7.) The problem with supporting people acting self-destructively is that you run the risk of subsidizing that very behavior that got the person into trouble.

8.) Ideally, this can be avoided by adopting tailor-made forms of support, that help the person in question get out of his/her situation.

9.) If this isn’t possible, cohesion and in the end force, are usually considered – i.e. people/the state step in and take over the running of certain aspects of a person’s life.

10.) A good example of this dilemma is contemporary homelessness – to a significant degree a result of a shift in the willingness of the state to use force in order to take control over people who make “bad choices”. (I.e, we no longer forcibly institutionalize drug addicts and the mentally handicapped and/or diseased to the same degree as earlier.)

11.) The reason dispassionate discussion of this subject is so difficult is the fact that the two major secular religions of today, “Right” and “Left” have some of their axioms threatened by it.

12.) For the Right, this is the axiom regaring the absolute goodness of Free Choice, etc.

13.) For the Left, it is the axiom of empirical egalitarianism that is the main cause.

I could go on, but I’ll break here and go to bed.

Regards, Döbeln

-Stabil som fan!

kip: Government is simply not a “good neighbor” or “decent human being”. It’s not a person. It’s an institution; one necessarily founded on coercion, and necessarily run on rules rather than “giving people what they ought to have for trying hard” – if it attempts to be the latter, it becomes entirely arbitrary.

That you want government to be a “Good Neighbor”, or act “Decently” is understandable. Thinking that it can do so, and continue to do so over a long period of time, without becoming a monster, is a mistake. (This is all old news; Hayek wrote it decades ago, and it’s still true. Government, to put it simply, not only is not, but cannot be Mommy.)

Throwing fits (this is directed at everyone in general who is guilty, by the way) when someone else says that’s not government’s job, or calling them names for not being compassionate enough with other people’s money is, to put it mildly, counterproductive. GC may well be wrong, or poorly stating his case, but the counter-“argument” seems mostly to be merely opposed cant, rather than actual argument.

(More relevantly, I don’t see that the post description of someone failed by “The market” applies. Caroline managed to throw away huge piles of money on houses she’d owned… by having to pay penalties for prepayment on the contracts she signed, and having to pay back pro-rated grants from the Government… in order to get the education she wanted from the Government for her child.

Notice a theme here? Government grants and state schools combined with poor choices on her part, and Henry’s saying the market screwed her?

She herself said she never got anywhere, and people didn’t say nice things about her, for most of her working life. And the market is blamed for this, not anything about her? I don’t wish to blame the victim, but what alternative is there that fits the available data? The market didn’t screw the other people working crappy jobs, uniformly.

If one asks the Godless Capitalists to not blame government for every ill, perhaps it would be best to, in turn, not blame “the market” or “big business” for places where government fails? (Her Medicare dentures didn’t fit; dentures provided by the market, of course, would have been fixed for free, or the provider would have lost customers and been sued. The state has no such incentives.

But we’re left with “market failure” as the explanation for her problems – if only stupid companies wouldn’t care about stupid things like stupid customers wanting to deal with employees with teeth!

Caoline is a good person and thus does not deserve to be poor; if she is poor, the market obviously failed to renumerate her properly for being good. We’re back to Hayek and The Constitution of Liberty again; neither market nor state can nor should even attempt to renumerate for “goodness”. If you think they should, please provide a mechanism for measuring such, and a way to make the scheme not collapse. Lots of luck.

At very least, stop blaming only The Market and Capitalists for tragedy; the Welfare State makes plenty of its own as well.

Come on, guys. Blaming everything on Capitalism is as bad as pretending the State has no legitimate interests in the social sphere; it’s just more acceptable to the CT readership.

(Kudos to the Times for recognising that not everything is the fault of Plutocrats, at least, at the end of page 2.)

(On kip’s talk of fairness… the question is, as you say, what do we mean by fairness? Fairness of result or fairness of treatment by controlled institutions or what? The former should be recognised as impossible, the latter as necessary for liberal government. “Fair” as anything beyond “rules that apply equally to everyone [as appropriate in context]” becomes exceedingly difficult, and while I understand the reasons why one might think we “need to make the world fair”, I’m not sure that urge is actually good, if carried out. States are a dangerous (if necessary) thing, and the more power they have, the more dangerous they come. And, of course, using them to make things more “fair” gives them not only power, but often arbitrary power. That’s a possibility to think very long and very hard before endorsing.)

Ah, rambling. Sorry.

The problem with the working poor is the opposite of “a failure to live by the right values,” as Timothy Burke puts it — it is the failure to abandon moral values. To make money in this system, you probably have to adapt the kind of concentration camp guard values exemplified by “Godless capitalist” — you have to be so selfish you’d let your retarded daughter be raped by your ex husband if preventing it cost you any money, you have to be so ruthless that you systematically cheat your credit card company — something on the order of what Enron, WorldCom, or other big companies do routinely — and you have to be blind enough to think that your success (a success measured only by money) is the same as goodness. Plus, it was built by your own effort — a laughable myth, useful for diverting people from the fact that such executives as Larry Ellison are really worth the whole sum of Caroline Payne’s monthly paycheck per minute. Right.

To counter that system, no argument or government program is going to work. What works are unions, alliances between various progressive groups, a willingness to use civil disobedience as ruthlessly as businesses do (see the systematic violation of banking law before the repeal of the Glass-Steagle act), and a complete contempt for things like the Independent Woman’s Forum.

loren: I’m starting from a couple of moral assumptions that you may not share, namely

(a) choice (with its corollary, consent) is indeed a supreme value in itself, and

(b) need is not a claim.

Moral desert in the sense of positive entitlement is not, I agree, a very useful concept– anyone who claims to know what people deserve in a positive sense is being arrogant. Much easier and sounder to delineate a sort of negative desert: my claim to my stuff comes not from positive entitlement but from the negative right to be left alone, and that’s a right that cannot be overridden by another’s need, due to (b) above.

Which doesn’t mean that others’ needs shouldn’t excite sympathy and voluntary effort: just that they don’t create claims.

Wait a minute, so the new conservative standard for the “deserving poor” is now “never fucked up in their entire life”? That’s the vibe I’m getting here. Christ, IMHO the poor fuck up less than the rich, based on what I’ve seen.

“It will always be the case that many people’s lives will be filled with pain….”

That’s the American can-do spirit, right there!

nicholas: true, I’m not inclined to accept unfettered choice as a moral primitive: this seems to me to assume to much.

I do think there are strong arguments for a right to be left alone, but I suspect we’d disagree on the content of that right. For instance, I’d offer bodily integrity (no torture or coerced organ donations) as a basic right, but it isn’t obvious to me that freedom to earn whatever I can get on a market follows easily from, say, a right not to have other people use my body in certain ways against my will.

These two things might be logically related, certainly: taxing me to offset someone else’s bad luck might be an unacceptable use of my body against my will (taxation as forced labor). But I think that argument needs to be made, not assumed.

I agree that needs do not obviously generate claims. They might, they might not. But I see no good reason to reject, out of hand, the possibility that citizens might, upon reflection, agree to treat some sorts of need as the basis for certain kinds of legitimate claims.

We might, of course, deny that _any_ such claims are legitimate, regardless of consensus or majority decisions: they simply cannot be just, because they offend our moral primitive: unrestricted liberty to do whatever I want with my body and my property. But this just invites the question: why _that_ moral primitive? Why not a less sweeping conception of choice?

If we simply assert the obviousness of our assumption, then the dispute becomes one of competing articles of faith — the dispute is religious, not political. But if we want an account of justice that admits of widespread acceptance, then we’d try to avoid critical dependence on such articles of faith.

No protagonists in this one.

Whoops. . except for dan simon. Missed the ounce of sense in the sound and fury.

Caroline Payne’s poverty only exists relatively. She’s apparently lived and is living a long life, has had multiple children — one of whom is relatively healthy and safe despite a mental handicap, can provide for her basic needs, has shelter, and has many things to look forward to. The major cause of her suffering is that she lives her life in the shadow of the most obscenely wealthy people in history. Permanently surrounded by gratuitous displays of wealth, health, and comfort, she is constantly reminded that her life does not add up. That doesn’t mean that her suffering doesn’t exist, or that good people shouldn’t try to ameliorate it. It means that her suffering isn’t assuaged by giving her more money. And even if it were, the proper route would by no means be an anonymous budgetary leviathan.

That said, the self-righteous blowhards who need to dump on Caroline and insult her and her children to make themselves feel better are heartless pricks, undeserving of whatever divine grace they happen to believe in.

I’m torn by this story, and dan simon seems to have the best answer.

“Once we accept this premise, then the question is shifted from an emotionally fraught moral one (“who is causing Caroline Payne to suffer?”) to a more practical one (“how best can we work to reduce the suffering of the Caroline Paynes of the world?”).”

The reason I’m torn is that I know someone much like this woman who has, likewise, completely ruined her life, and continues to do so. In her youth she was beautiful and earned perhaps a hundred thousand a year — which was not saved but spent on immediate pleasures — why buy practical $50 shoes when you can buy brand-named $500 shoes? Pursued by many men, she was unwilling to make a choice based on his sense and decency, but held out for perfection, which of course never arrived. Of course the youth faded, the money ran out, and she is living hand to mouth. But still she appears to have learned nothing. Anyone criticizing her decisions, in the most constructive way possible, will be given an earful — with the natural consequence that everyone who knows her is terrified to give her advice and leaves her to stumble on, making stupid purchases, wasting time on what are clearly inappropriate jobs for her. She’s still attractive, and still has a choice of men. But the decent, homely, guy who was willing to help her out was scorned, while she went for the bad boy, good looks, leather jacket, (probably selling drugs IMHO), a pathetic look at 20, and beyond pathetic at 40; and that of course ended in tears.

So how is one to respond to a story like the above? Of course it is human to feel sorry for her misery. It is also human to feel anger and frustration at her, at what seems to be a deliberate attempt to undermine every opportunity life throws at her.

All I can offer is perhaps a variant on that old canard, better education. There is a tradition in the US of shielding children and teenagers from the realitiesof life. They are not told how much real things (mortgages, medical insurance) cost, they are not told what the wages they can expect for different jobs (including taxes) really are. They are not told the realities of just how miserable their lives can be if they make bad decisions. What they are told is homilies about how you can be anything you want, how children are a joy, how being “yourself” is the most important thing, how if a company doesn’t want to hire you because of your tattoos/clothing/personal interactions, well it’s their loss, but god forbid you change. They are told that compromise, whether for your spouse or your employer, is “selling out”.
All this strikes me as less than helpful. Happily married couples know that compromise is simply being a decent person, it’s not a political statement. Likewise happily employed people understand that in any collective endeavor, sometimes you get your way, sometimes you don’t. Finally being taught patience, the ability to accept some discomfort for the big payoff, whether that is staying in school, or saving for a downpayment by living in a dowdier apartment and driving a lousier car, or simply saying no to ever buying on credit, can only help.

“The idea that there are deserving poor and undeserving poor implies that your value as a human being depends upon the quality of your choices or the degree of your intellect or the content of your character.”

These are kind of the central tenets of “vulgar conservatism”, unfortunately.

Erm, that should be “payed by”. Me furregneirr.

Regards, Döbeln

-Stabil som fan!

And remember that from her own mouth she admits that she doesn’t get along with people very well no matter where she works. Who knows if that is the fault of her attitude or some poor training by her parents

Sebastian, there’s a third possibility. Have you ever been really, really unhappy, for a period of months? You tend to find that it makes it a lot more difficult to “get on” with other people.

…just can’t stop posting. Noticed this in the original post:

“Homophobia isn’t there to keep homosexuals in line. Homophobia is there to keep everyone else in line.”

Caroline Payne is in her condition in order to keep the rest of us in line.”

In *what* line? There is no argument here – just the standard semi-conspiratorial reference to Da Man, keeping good people down, yaddayadda. Is this what passes for profound insight on the left these days?

Regards, Döbeln

-Stabil som fan!

“The problem with the working poor is the opposite of “a failure to live by the right values,” as Timothy Burke puts it — it is the failure to abandon moral values. To make money in this system, you probably have to adapt the kind of concentration camp guard values exemplified by “Godless capitalist” — you have to be so selfish you’d let your retarded daughter be raped by your ex husband if preventing it cost you any money, you have to be so ruthless that you systematically cheat your credit card company — something on the order of what Enron, WorldCom, or other big companies do routinely”

Actually, to make money in this system, you have to entice other people to give you money. You can do that by fulfilling any one of their myriad wants and needs (well, almost any of their wants, under our system). Make other people happy, and you’ll be rewarded. Not a bad system, overall.

“I am intrigued by the argument expressed by some that Liberals or Leftists who would not find the cited example as a satisfactory state of affairs, are somehow just trying to pass the buck off onto some poor hardworking fellow citizen. Apart from the obvious fact that non-fiscal measures like employment regulation, housing policies, an effective social services system that come to mind; ”

You mean the housing policies that jack up the cost of housing and make it less likely that people of modest means can afford to live somewhere without resorting to charity?

My preferred housing policy is: let developers buy land, build houses, and sell them without a whole lot of hassles or multiple rounds of Mother May I or mandatory features (minimum lot sizes, for instance) that jack up the costs, then have the police protect every neighborhood, no matter how cheap.

Meanwhile, employment regulation is often not our friend either. Employers should be able to offer 40 hours per week, and even more, without having to give “benefits”; that one requirement limits lots of people to 37 hours to their detriment.

“Housing policies” do not necessarily equal rent control. It could have meant ending exclusionary zoning.

Regressive local taxes don’t help either, of course. I think the primary problem with housing policy in this country may be that it’s written by people who already own homes in the right places, and against renters and people who want to move in.

Ken –

My point was that there are a number of other possibilities at solving this problem apart from just throwing money at it; and the way some modern conservatives immediately jump to this conclusion tells us less about what these solutions could be and more what the former are really worried about. I don’t know what the housing policy is or what the regulatory structure in the US is either as I don’t live there but it seems to me that improving the situation of those like Carolyn would involve something other than just handing the whole thing to the market and just letting private charities clear up the mess. I understand from the little I know about domestic US history, that something along these lines did exist in the era of small govt from the 1890s to the interwar period and it wasn’t all that much of a good time for the working poor. The basic problem is that what is being faced here is really how to manage risk at the societal level; understandably since risk is a capital Conservatives, Liberals and Leftists all vary on how this should be done. Unsurprisingly the former want to generally privatise risk as an asset and break up the market for it into segmented layers; whereas just as predictably, the latter propose collective solutions that involve a more unified and inclusive market – the difference can be seen as one seeking to minimise absolute costs, the other seeking to minimise relative costs. I don’t mind having a discussion along these lines without lapsing into the increasingly popular paranoia that all Leftists/Liberals are some type of evil leprechauns who run around trying to nick the pot o’ gold that hardworking conservatives have acquired through arduous and backbreaking labour (or so they say anyway).

It would also be nice if the typical Conservative response doesn’t fall into the recurring typologies that AO Hirschman outlines in his “Rhetoric of Reaction” which takes three basic forms: (i)the perversity thesis according to which any purposive action to improve some features of the social or economic order only serves to exacerbate the condition one wishes to remedy, (ii) the futility thesis which argues that attempts at social transformation will be unavailing, that they will simply fail to “make a dent” and finally (iii) the jeopardy thesis that insists the costs of any proposed change or reform is too high and endangers some previous or existing desirable ends/accomplishments. This is also something I don’t mind debating or talking about; however it is not as if none of these criticisms had not already been anticipated and factored in by many liberals/leftists so treating them like some sort of errant children that are just being unrealistic is not likely to bring forth an understanding response.

“This is also something I don’t mind debating or talking about; however it is not as if none of these criticisms had not already been anticipated and factored in by many liberals/leftists so treating them like some sort of errant children that are just being unrealistic is not likely to bring forth an understanding response.”

Then let me introduce a fourth argument: even if the policies favored by our friends on the left succeed in improving the situation of the poor, our favored policies of minimal interference in the marketplace will lead to improvements in the kind and in the cost of available products and services that improve the lot of everyone, including those of modest and less than modest means, more effectively, and enable continued improvements over time without limit.

Then let me introduce a fourth argument: even if the policies favored by our friends on the left succeed in improving the situation of the poor, our favored policies of minimal interference in the marketplace will lead to improvements in the kind and in the cost of available products and services that improve the lot of everyone, including those of modest and less than modest means, more effectively, and enable continued improvements over time without limit.

Historically speaking, I think the evidence would show that without these policies from the Left and some from the paternalist Conservative right, that this would not be the case. However, the argument is not that no improvement would occur in absolute terms; but that it would be greater than the policy packages which don’t abandon everything to the marketplace or that they would somehow lead to a net reduction in benefits on an aggregate basis. Needless to say, I don’t think there is a decisive case either way; which is why so many of these debates are ideologically driven rather than purely technically so.

Re: the 1890s etc. so your argument is that every major improvement for working people and the middle classes since then has been due to technological growth or the unimpeded market and owes nothing at all to various welfare interventions? If this is a correct interpretation of your point, I think it is well sort of misguided to say the least.

“How best can we work to reduce the suffering of the Caroline Paynes of the world?”

Thanks, Dan Simon, I just wanted to see that again.

“Ken, allow me to summarize: “the poor must suffer today to help the middle class of tomorrow!”

Note: also applies to the prescription drug investment arguments.”

Yup, the left returns to its silly, unfounded tropes. Wealth does not in itself require exploitation of the poor. And the existance of poverty does nothing to indicate that exploitation created it.

“If mental health is part of the picture in this particular case, then the best response to situations like this might be something other than changes to economic structures.”
Well, duh. Good to see somebody gets it.

Tom, that’s an excellent point. The reason it doesn’t get regulated adequately, of course, is that both the big credit-card companies and the lowlifes who operate subprime lending companies spend a lot of money on lobbying and campaign contributions.

Dear dear … I’m in the middle – this case is an indictment of us all, poverty is relative, and we should do what we can to save ourselves AS WELL AS to save others … and what a lot of personal abuse is flying past me in both directions. Calling each other names generates heat, but little light.

“Why on Earth, in ninety-something comments, has nobody pointed out the abject lunacy of a regulatory system that allows someone who’s never earned $30k in a year to rack up $30k in credit-card debt?”

Because there’s no lunacy I can see in a “regulatory system” that fails to treat those over 18 as children. There shouldn’t be any agency with the power to “allow” or “disallow” people over 18 to borrow money from a willing lender and legally obligate himself to pay it back.

Next, I suppose you’re going to tell me that people over 18 should have an agency with the power to forbid them, for their own good, to…

(jeez, I’m running out of examples that haven’t already been implemented or seriously considered! What’s wrong with this country?)

Obviously, there are a few people out there that really aren’t able to handle the demands and responsibilities of adulthood. Maybe we should allow people to petition DCFS to revoke their adulthood and place them with foster parents…